tin copy and his manuscript with pencil notes looking
like cobwebs, and on one page was written "Never show half finished
work to women or fools." The treatment meted to his manuscript would,
if Burton had been a poet of the first order, have drawn tears from a
milestone. But it must be borne in mind that Lady Burton did consider
him a poet of the first order, for she ranked his Camoens and his
Kasidah with the work of Shakespere. And this is how she treated a work
which she considered a world-masterpiece. First she skimmed it over,
then she expurgated it, and finally she either typed it herself, [663]
or, what is more likely, put it into the hands of a typist who must have
been extremely illiterate or abominably careless. Then, without even
troubling to correct the copy, she sent the manuscript of the Catullus
up the chimney after that of The Scented Garden. The typewritten copy
was forwarded to the unhappy and puzzled Mr. Leonard C. Smithers, with
the request, which was amusing enough, that he would "edit it" and bring
it out. Just as a child who has been jumping on the animals of a Noah's
Ark brings them to his father to be mended.

"To me," observes Mr. Smithers piteously, "has fallen the task of
editing Sir Richard's share in this volume from a type-written copy
literally swarming with copyist's errors. [664] Lady Burton has without
any reason constantly refused me even a glance at his MS." The book,
such as it was, appeared in 1894. If Burton had not been embalmed he
would have turned in his coffin. We may or may not pardon Lady Burton
for destroying the MS. of The Scented Garden, but it is impossible not
to pass upon her at any rate a mild censure for having treated in that
way a translation of Catullus after it had been expurgated to her own
taste. Whether Burton would have considerably improved the poetry of his
version we cannot say; but as it stands no single poem is superior to
the work of his predecessors. One need only compare his rendering of the
lines "To the Peninsula of Sirmio" with the Hon. George Lamb's [665]

"Sirmio of all the shores the gem,"

or Leigh Hunt's

"O, best of all the scattered spots that lie,"

to see what a fall was there, and yet neither Lamb's version nor
Hunt's is satisfactory. His "Atys" pales before Cranstoun's, and his
"Epithalamium," is almost unreadable; while the lines "On the death of
Lesbia's Sparrow" naturally compel comparison with Byron's version.
Nor will re